IN MARCH 1996, on the anniversary of John Dee’s death in 1609, a local paranormal group attempted to levitate the Corn Exchange in Manchester. The group believed alchemist, mathematician and some say, magician, John Dee, had lived for several years on the site of the Corn Exchange - doubtful history but fun. He allegedly lived here while exercising his duty as the Warden of the town at what is now the nearby Chetham’s Library and Medieval Buildings.
After the 1996 IRA bomb there was an attempt to turn the building into a shopping centre but the idea back-fired...
Manchester can claim to very many marvellous facts but this is the only one that involves modern magic. But then again prior to 1996 the Corn Exchange had hosted a rich assortment of strange and curious retailers, poets and low-rent offices.
Down on the former trading floor you could in half an hour buy a rare bootleg album by cult-Manchester band Magazine, have your tarot read, buy an obscure antiquarian book, a pair of tartan platform shoes and wait for that tattoo you’d always wanted. You could then cycle home on a top of the range bike from Harry Hall Cycles.
Upstairs Carcanet Press had their offices, one of the UK’s best-known poetry publishers and a labour of love from Mexican Michael Schmidt. Schmidt and Carcanet are still going strong after more than 45 years of rhyme and reason.
John Dee: alchemist, mathematician and some say, magician
Once, while on a mission to collect a poster from a Corn Exchange printers, I passed an open door on the second floor.
“And what goes on in here?” I asked the elderly gentlemen bent over an array of obscure looking instruments and tiny machine components.
“I repair electric razors,” he said.
“Nothing else,” I said.
“Nothing else,” he said.
I paused.
“Is there much call for that?” I asked.
“You’d be surprised,” he said.
I was.
Yet the eccentric Corn Exchange as an ‘alternative’ market was just one episode in its history. The name gives the game away. Its history has mainly been tied up with food, either the trade in corn or wholesale grocery.
It was for trade that several Manchester food merchants met together on Thursday 5 June, 1834, to discuss the need for a covered market. They advertised for property to be sold and converted between Hanging Ditch and Fennel Street. Previously the merchants had met in the open in all weathers on the corner of Cathedral Street and Fennel Street.
Things moved quickly. On January 6th, 1837, a grand dinner was given to celebrate the opening of the Corn Exchange. The Manchester Guardian (now The Guardian) wrote, "We congratulate the promoters of the new edifice on at length possessing a corn exchange worthy of the importance of this great and flourishing town."
It was a beauty too, although occupying only a fraction of the present site. The architect was Richard Lane who also designed the still surviving Friends Meeting House on Mount Street close to the Town Hall. The columned Classical building provided a façade to an 80ft by 70ft trading hall.
The grace of the Classical: the columns of the Corn Exchange glimpsed on Hanging Ditch
The attractive nature of the hall meant it could be rented out in the evenings for concerts and entertainment and thus provide extra revenue for the Corn Exchange shareholders. Political meetings took place there too, including appropriately a renowned Anti-Corn Law rally. For a while it was even a Sunday chapel, ‘for which £100 a year was paid and Father Gavazzi, Father Ignatius, and a celebrated Wesleyan minister, the Rev Dr Brammont, all delivered lectures’.
As the nineteenth century progressed it became apparent the building was way too small for the growth in the Manchester grocery and corn trade. Plans were put in place and eventually the whole city block bought and converted into the Corn Exchange we know today. Architects Ball & Elce were responsible for the brick part to Fennel Street and Potts, Son & Pickup the rest. The vastly enlarged building was finished in 1903 with its trademark dome and familiar Renaissance style façade.
The familiar expanded Corn Exchange
As the finishing touches were being applied a newspaper noted, ‘The extension of the Exchange, which is rapidly approaching completion, will render it the most commodious of the kind in the kingdom, and the enlargement will meet the demands of the Grocery Market, which is the largest and most important in the country, Manchester being the great centre of the provision trade in the north of England.’
There were good and profitable years following opening but they didn't last. Different ways of doing business, the movement of the trade from central locations, the growth in technology led to the closure of the Corn Exchange in the decades that followed WWII. The large trading floor was used as rehearsal space for the Royal Exchange Theatre Company for a while and part of Brideshead Revisited by Granada TV was filmed there. Then the eccentric market and the electric razor repairers moved in.
Fabulous view from the CIS Tower in the 1960s, showing the familiar triangle of the Corn Exchange between the Cathedral and Manchester's long gone 'flat iron' office building
Entertainment returned though.
From the sixties to the nineties on the Fennel Street side of the building there’d been nightclubs with the two best known being Pips and Konspiracy, the latter following the other in the same space. Pips is remembered with complete affection. It advertised ‘nine beautiful bars and eleven crowded dancefloors’ and with its Roxy and Bowie Rooms it was the city’s cool-glamour venue where extravagance was a la mode. Movingly, following David Bowie's death recently a flowery shrine was created by fans at the site of the former entrance.
A cursory request for memories from Twitter garnered this memory from Patpat, ‘Once met my cousin Brian on Saturday night in the Victoria Bridge taxi queue in 1975. He’d been to Pips and was wearing a white suit and carrying an empty violin case. His girlfriend was wearing a fox fur.’
Despite having a room named in honour of his band, one story relates how the dapper Bryan Ferry was once refused admission for wearing jeans. Regulars from Manchester’s music scene included Joy Division/New Order boys, Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook, The Smiths’ leaders Morrissey and Johnny Marr and Factory Records' folk such as Tony Wilson and Peter Saville. The Mark Addy pub in the city centre, until flooded out in January, hosted a monthly Pips night.
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The Bowie tributeAfter the 1996 IRA bomb there was an attempt to turn the building into a shopping centre but the idea back-fired despite some weird architectural ideas including a bizarre pod under the dome containing a chain coffee shop. A decision was made to leave the heritage behind and re-name the building The Triangle. It was name and a shape that never fitted.
A return to food and drink, if not their wholesale provision, looks a far better bet. A return to the original name is welcome too. This is a building of strong architecture married to rich history of trade and entertainment. It’s a building that elegantly locks down a strong central Manchester presence, let's hope the idea of the Corn Exchange as a destination for food works better than the ill-fated shopping centre. Let's hope Salvi's, Gino's, Pho, Tampopo, Vapiano and so on come good.
Of course, the building isn’t likely to levitate anytime soon, despite the best efforts of the Manchester Area Psychogeographic, but it should provide a much more stable focus for Manchester life.
The preposterous coffee pod in the Triangle Shopping Centre
The Corn Exchange during recent renovation work
